Voting and tuition: Students are being milked

February 11. 2014 4:23PMA bill up for a vote in the House today would clarify that anyone registered to vote in New Hampshire is eligible for in-state tuition at University System of New Hampshire institutions. Democrats insist, as Rep. Anne Grassie, D-Rochester, did, that “there is no correlation” between voting and in-state tuition. Then how does she explain that the University of New Hampshire considers voting registration to be an indication of residency for determining a student’s tuition rate?

University System of New Hampshire trustees set the requirements for in-state and out-of-state tuition. The first is that a student must be domiciled in New Hampshire for at least 12 months to qualify for in-state tuition. Ten other factors are “relevant” to determining domicile. They include automobile registration, residence as listed on tax returns, and “voting residence.”

As university policy already declares that voting residence is an indication of one’s domicile for tuition purposes, it is pretty hard to argue that the two have “no correlation.” They clearly do. House Bill 1255 would clarify legally what common sense and UNH policy already recognize — that one votes where one is legally domiciled. To claim otherwise is to hold the absurd position that one is legally entitled to vote where one is not a legally domiciled resident.

New Hampshire Democrats are clearly saying that they want out-of-state students to vote in New Hampshire and pay out-of-state tuition. The only beneficiary of this policy is the New Hampshire Democratic Party, which receives the votes of both the out-of-state students and the faculty whose salaries (and donations to the Democratic Party) are financed by the higher out-of-state tuition rates. The out-of-state students lose. Those at UNH pay an additional $14,000 a year in tuition. How compassionate. We wonder if those students will ever realize that they are being used.